Drive Route 20 through Chautauqua County and the vineyards can seem so much a part of the landscape that it is easy to forget how unusual they are.

For generations, rows of grapevines have stretched across the narrow plain between Lake Erie and the hills rising toward the Allegheny Plateau. They have shaped not only the landscape, but communities such as Westfield, Ripley and Brocton: the farms people worked, the businesses that employed them, and traditions that remain part of local life.

It begins with geography.

Along Lake Erie’s southeastern shore, the land rises more than 700 feet toward the Allegheny Plateau. Between the lake and that higher ground lies a relatively narrow band of land unusually well suited to growing fruit. Lake Erie is the essential ingredient. The enormous body of water heats and cools more slowly than the surrounding land, moderating temperature extremes and extending its influence roughly 10 to 15 miles inland. The higher ground helps contain that moderating effect along the lake plain.

The soils help, too. Ancient lake beaches and glacial activity left a varied landscape that includes gravelly and sandy loams as well as silt, clay and shale-based soils. Grapevines generally thrive where their roots have good drainage, and many sites along the Lake Erie plain provide just that.

Together, lake, land and climate created something remarkable: a grape-growing region in a part of the country where winters would otherwise make commercial viticulture far more difficult.

The grape that found a home

Grapes were grown along Lake Erie before the Concord arrived. But the introduction of the Concord grape transformed the region.

The variety itself originated in Concord, Massachusetts, where Ephraim Wales Bull developed it in the mid-19th century from native American grape stock. By the late 1850s it was spreading rapidly. Concord was introduced around Westfield in 1859, and within a decade grape acreage in Chautauqua County was expanding quickly.

The grape had found an extraordinarily good home.

Hardy enough for the region’s climate and suitable for juice, jelly, fresh consumption and other uses, Concord became the foundation of a commercial agricultural industry. Vineyards multiplied along the Lake Erie plain.

Today, Cornell describes the Lake Erie American Viticultural Area as the largest grape-production region east of the Rocky Mountains, with more than 31,500 vineyard acres in New York and Pennsylvania. About 80 percent of the region’s grapes are grown for juice and jelly rather than wine.

But acreage alone doesn’t explain what grapes meant here. An industry grew around them.

Westfield and the rise of Welch’s

Perhaps no development changed the Concord grape’s fortunes—or Westfield’s—more than grape juice.

In 1869, New Jersey dentist and prohibitionist Thomas Bramwell Welch developed a method of pasteurizing grape juice so that fermentation could be prevented. His son, Charles Welch, recognized its commercial possibilities and began promoting it more aggressively.

Welch’s Grape Juice received national attention at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Four years later, Charles Welch brought the business to Westfield, close to both a large supply of Concord grapes and rail transportation. The company erected a factory near the Nickel Plate Railroad in 1897. It expanded that building in 1899 and again in 1903—an indication of how quickly the business was growing.

As Welch’s became a national brand, Westfield became known as the “Grape Juice Capital of the World.”

The consequences extended far beyond one company. Grapes created demand for labor, transportation, processing, equipment and services. They provided livelihoods for farm families and helped shape the physical and economic character of communities throughout the grape belt.

Growers also organized to strengthen their position in the marketplace. The Growers Co-operative Grape Juice Company was established in Westfield in 1929, providing another market for locally grown fruit. The cooperative tradition would become an important part of the industry’s history.

For much of the 20th century, grape growing and processing weren’t simply industries located in Westfield. They were part of what Westfield was.

From grape juice to wine country

Over time, another grape industry developed alongside the region’s traditional juice business.

Wine production has deep roots along Lake Erie, but the modern wine industry has expanded considerably as growers and winemakers experimented with French-American hybrids, cold-hardy wine grapes and traditional European varieties alongside native grapes such as Concord and Niagara.

Today, wineries dot the Lake Erie shoreline from Chautauqua County into Pennsylvania, creating the region now promoted as Lake Erie Wine Country. Cornell estimates that roughly 20 percent of grape production in the New York and Pennsylvania portion of the Lake Erie region is fermented, compared with the much larger share destined for juice and jelly.

Wine has therefore added another dimension to grape country—tourism. Visitors who once might simply have driven past the vineyards now stop at wineries, restaurants, shops and attractions, creating another way for the grape-growing landscape to support the communities around it.

A heritage under pressure

The history of the Concord Grape Belt has never been one of uninterrupted prosperity.

Welch’s itself eventually changed. The company’s headquarters left Westfield in the 1980s, part of a downsizing that cost the community hundreds of jobs. The old headquarters building remains, a physical reminder of how closely the fortunes of a national company and a small village were once intertwined.

Today, the challenge is more fundamental: finding sufficient markets for the grapes themselves.

Americans drink less grape juice than they once did, a long-term change Cornell researchers were already identifying years ago as a major strain on Concord growers.

That pressure became painfully immediate in 2026 when Refresco, a major processor in the Lake Erie region, canceled contracts with 126 growers covering approximately 2,600 acres in New York and Pennsylvania. Growers who had already invested in producing this year’s crop suddenly faced the prospect of having grapes without a buyer.

The response has demonstrated that the grape industry still matters well beyond individual farms. Pennsylvania committed $500,000 to purchase and process grapes affected by the cancellations, and in August the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed to purchase $20 million in surplus Concord grape juice for food-assistance programs. Those measures provide relief, but they do not resolve the industry’s longer-term challenge of developing markets that can sustain growers for another generation.

A landscape worth preserving

Perhaps that is why the history matters now.

The Concord Grape Belt is not a museum piece. People still prune vines in winter, watch buds emerge in spring, manage the crop through summer and wait for sugars to rise as harvest approaches. Trucks still carry grapes down roads that have run through vineyards for generations.

And the region is finding new ways to tell that story.

The Grape Discovery Center in Westfield, the official visitor center for the Lake Erie Concord Grape Belt Heritage Area, preserves and interprets more than 150 years of grape-growing history. Its exhibits connect the crop in the vineyard with the growers, processors and communities that grew around it.

Each September, the Westfield Grape & Wine Festival provides another kind of connection. This year’s festival, September 18 and 19, brings grape stomping, grape pies, local wine and craft beverages, food, music and educational activities into a community whose relationship with the grape stretches back more than a century and a half.

The future of the Concord grape industry will almost certainly look different from its past. Markets change. Companies move. Consumer tastes evolve. New products and new uses will have to be found.

But there is one thing that cannot be relocated or easily reproduced: the narrow strip of land between Lake Erie and the hills, where geography, climate and generations of human effort created one of America’s distinctive agricultural landscapes.

The vineyards are part of the history of this place.

The hope is that they will remain part of its future.

Photo Credit: Johnsons Estate Vineyards

For visitors traveling the Lake Erie shoreline, a trip through wine country may begin with a glass poured among the vineyards, but it certainly does not have to end there.

Stretching 50 miles from New York State to Pennsylvania, Lake Erie Wine Country draws visitors to a landscape shaped by vineyards, generations of grape-growing and wineries that offer experiences you can only get here. But the wineries are only one part of the experience.

There is something special about traveling through grape country. The region’s grape-growing heritage is a story generations in the making. The Concord Grape Belt stretches along the Lake Erie shoreline through Pennsylvania and New York, where the lake and surrounding landscape have helped create conditions that have supported grape growing for more than a century.

The communities nestled in wine country are part of the charm, too. Small towns and villages offer places to wander, shop, eat or simply slow down for a while. The Lake Erie shoreline adds another dimension to the landscape, with opportunities to enjoy the water, take in the scenery or follow a road simply to see where it goes.

That may be one of the greatest strengths of Lake Erie Wine Country: there is no single way to experience it. A morning might begin beside Lake Erie before giving way to an afternoon among the vineyards. Visitors can linger over a glass of wine, wander through a small town or take the long way between stops just to enjoy the view. An afternoon can easily become a day, and a day can become a weekend. The wine may bring visitors to the region, but grape country itself has a way of inviting them to stay.